Beautiful Butterfly Cake

My close friend Rebecca's daughter Zoe turned four this week and she was very keen to have a butterfly cake for her fairy themed party.  Apart from the butterfly shape, my brief was to keep the colours bright and girly, but the decorations were completely up to me. Love these kinds of projects! Here's how it came out:

And here is how I made it:

I used the cake recipe from this post for the cake, which is a simple vanilla cake. For an extra girly touch, I marbled pink through the cake. Once I mixed the batter, I took poured about a quarter of it into a seperate bowl and tinted it pink with food colouring.

I used the Wilton Butterfly tin I hired from my local cake decorating shop, greased it and filled it with the vanilla cake mix.

I spooned the pink mixture over the top -

Then used the back of a spoon to gently stir the pink mix through the vanilla mix to create the marble effect. Only stir gently though - you don't want the colours to mix too much or the marbling won't show once it is baked.

(Keeping it real shot there - see my little helper's hand there in the picture:) )

These types of cake tins are great - they are embossed so once the cake is baked and turned out, the cake has the pattern imprinted on it making decorating easy. Speaking of easy, I like to keep these types of projects quick and simple, and I have to really with a 2.5 year old and a 5 month old. So Betty Crocker ready made icing is my secret weapon!

Here is the work in progress - I tinted the icing yellow, purple and pink using gel food colourings. Gel colourings are much better than liquid, the colours are stronger and you don't need as much. For the decorating I spread the yellow around the edges with a thin metal spatula, used a piping bag with a no.3 tip for the outlining, and a no. 21 star tip for filling the wings with colour and creating the outline around the cake's base.

To embellish I used white heart shaped lollies (similar to runts) and mini m&ms.

The birthday girl was thrilled! And I was pretty pleased with how it came out too. :)